Like a lot of folks I’m moving to Mastodon. It’s not to say you’ll never see me on Twitter again, but I’ll be putting my focus on Mastodon.
[UPDATE FEB 2023]
Well, maybe not. Mstdn.party, the instance where I’d made my account, was abandoned by its administrator and was beginning to be blocked. So I deleted my account there while I figure out where to go next.
If you have a reliable instance to recommend I’d like to hear about it!
When I was a boy I didn’t keep a journal because back then I didn’t know what a journal was, I knew what a diary was. Diaries were kept by girls, not boys in my mind. I thought about starting one and calling it a log book. Later I learned that another term was journal, but I still hesitated because even though I could call it a journal, I knew it was a diary.
Diaries were for spewing the innermost thoughts and secrets and feelings – something girls had in abundance – all the whispering and giggling in class was proof of that – but boys not so much.
I wanted to record the manly version of that stuff and clearly that was different. Little did I know how little difference there was. Ah the social constructs that were defined for us as kids.
How many years did I cheat myself out of useful insight by this silliness? Too many.
The most ridiculous part of this is that some of the most bad-ass diaries in existence were those kept by the men of the Shackleton expedition to Antarctica, including a year stuck on elephant island (a year!). Those men didn’t keep journals, they called them diaries. Even if they’d been pink and written in lavender ink in a pen with a furry ball on top they were still people who endured a life of unbelievable hardship, and managed to write about it.
What it’s called doesn’t matter. What matters is that you get started.
Welcome to the reboot of Recording Thoughts!
Back in March of 2005 I started a blog called Recording Thoughts where I wrote about pens and paper, journaling and writing, and how to record thoughts in general. I posted off and on up until about 2016 when life circumstances meant I just couldn’t writ much. It limped along until I shut it down in 2020.
Well life has calmed down quite a bit and I miss writing about these things, so I decided to restart the blog. Unfortunately, between changing hosts a few times and other challenges the backups I’d made before the shutting the site down were far from usable so it’s going to be more of a reboot than a restart!
